Abstract
Surplus populations are back on the political agenda. With the rise of automation technologies and the advent of the hyperflexible ‘gig economy’, millions of individuals across the post-industrialised world will likely become supernumerary or consigned to low-quality jobs in the service sector. Neoliberalism signalled the abdication of the state’s responsibility for ensuring full employment and providing high-quality employment. However, criminology has largely forgotten the central roles played by both in preventing the spread of social pathologies. Against the logic of neoliberalism, what is needed is a state capable of counteracting the formation of surplus populations, or an anti-surplus state. A second New Deal would enact infrastructure investments and re-embed superfluous populations into meaningful employment relations. Following Bourdieu’s criticism of a scientistic ‘flight into purity’, criminologists should adopt the lessons learned by Sweden’s interwar social democrats and advocate policies capable of preventing the augmentation of social superfluity.
Highlights
A surplus population is never inherently superfluous; a surplus exists only insofar as the state fails to include and involve in productive enterprises those bodies that are deemed superfluous
Roosevelt’s New Deal ‘alphabet agencies’. These were attempts to combat the horrors of unemployment, undignified scrambling over scarce resources and attendant social pathologies
‘Our greatest primary task is to put people to work’, Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1933: It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war ... accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources. (Roosevelt 1933/2014: 63)
Summary
A surplus population is never inherently superfluous; a surplus exists only insofar as the state fails to include and involve in productive enterprises those bodies that are deemed superfluous. The materialist doctrine is taken too literally, too unequivocally: most would recognise that there are layers of mediation exercised by such entities as the penal or carceral field (e.g., see Goodman, Page and Phelps 2017), or that we should expect to see a direct correlation at all times between unemployment and incarceration rates In part, this is because joblessness is being supplanted with a deteriorating quality of jobs, so that millions of Americans, for example, are struck from the unemployment records maintained by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics while being caught up in cycles of underemployment, low-quality employment and the exigencies of ‘flexible capitalism’ (Sennett 2006)—what we might call the ‘Uberization’ of the economy (Fleming 2017), or, more generally, ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2016). There are no good reasons why such a narrow approach should be taken today
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